We’re only a few days into February and already it’s starting to look like a big month for social media news. Here are some of the biggest stories.
Facebook celebrates Friends Day with a strange video on a day which isn’t Friends Day
Facebook have released a feature where a strange alien-humanoid-robot-thing made of reaction emojis and pictures of best friends, who aren’t really best friends at all, dances for you on a video. It’s been made all the more confusing by apparently celebrating “Friends Day” – however the offical day marked as Friendship Day occurs in June or August.
Many users have taken to social networking to voice their distress. Many people have said that the photos used aren’t of friends at all but distant relatives and acquaintances that they had been meaning to un-friend for quite some time.
Back in 2015 Mark Zuckerberg posted about Friends Day, citing that it was Facebook’s birthday – but the day wasn’t about them at all, it was about friendship. And because it’s not about them at all, they are obviously allowed to change the date of a official day recognised by the United Nations. We look forward to Christmas when it occurs next Tuesday.
Stastics in Snapchat’s IPO filing show a massive drop in growth after Instagram Stories
According to statistics in Snap’s filed IPO, the introduction of Instagram Stories is likely to have contributed somewhat to a slowing in growth rates of 82% for Snapchat. Although other factors were present for the drop at the end of Q3 2016, such as technical errors and the rise of international competitor Snow, marketers and analysers are pointing fingers to Instagram.
At the time of the drop Snap were also introducing Memories, a feature which saves users’ content within the app. This has been cited as a bandwidth-sensitive feature so it is likely to have also contributed to the slowing-down of growth rates. However, a quick glance at the IPO shows that Snap may indirectly highlight Stories…
“There are many factors that could negatively affect user retention, growth and engagement, including if… users increasingly engage with competing products instead of ours [and] our competitors may mimic our products and therefore harm our user engagement and growth.”
Instagram tests multi-photo galleries/posts
Some sponsored Instagram posts have made use of posting multiple pictures for some time. Now it looks like the average user will soon have access to this function. Members of the Instagram Android Beta Program Have reveled that the latest beta allows users to enable multi-photo selection with a long-press on the first photo.
The feature has been confirmed by The Verge who mentioned that it may have cropped up a little earlier then the social network intended, as attempts to publish albums currently results in an error message. They reached out to Instagram for more information on when it could be expected, but a spokesperson declined to comment.
